Maintained by Robin Tecon, microbiologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. This blog is about bacteria (and other microbes) and the scientists who study them.

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Sunday, April 19, 2015

A new textbook on microbial diversity has just been published by ASM Press. Principles of Microbial Diversity is a relatively thin textbook (392 pages) that is intended for undergraduate students who need to follow a course on microbial diversity, hence filling a gap in the available teaching material. His author is James W. Brown, a professor at North Carolina State University.

The book is pleasant to read and richly illustrated by hundreds of micrographs. But what is quite original, and to me very justified, is the author's perspective, which is, in James Brown's own words in the preface, "phylogenetic and organismal, from the Carl Woese school". I applaud that! Woese, as I discussed in a previous post, revolutionized biology by showing that we had until then totally ignored a whole distinct domain of life, the Archaea. This discovery was made through the careful analysis of the sequence of 16S rRNA gene (not an easy feat in the days of Woese's work). Because of this pedagogical and scientifical choice, Brown's book dedicates lots of pages to introduce phylogenetic concepts. Notably, he gives a didactic and useful explanation of how to construct a phylogenetic tree (Chapter 3). Brown explains his focus as follows (p. 351):

"In this book, the vantage point from which all of microbial diversity is viewed is the phylogenetic perspective. Other perspectives are possible and are very useful. Medical microbiology views the microbial world from the perspective of its influence on microbe-human interactions and human health. Environmental microbiology views the microbial world from the perspective of biogeochemical processes and ecosystems. […] However, the organizing principle of biology is evolutionary theory. The phylogenetic perspective is the view of biological diversity as the outcome of evolutionary history. This perspective is not exclusive of any other perspective on microbiology, but instead enriches these other perspectives."

Brown's textbook contribution is very welcome, and should find a place in each university's library.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The beginning of 2015 brought (potentially) good news for medicine: the discovery of a new antibiotic - teixobactin - isolated from soil bacteria. This result was published in Nature on January 22. (Unfortunately the whole text is not visible without payment or subscription.) Many newspapers and news outlets covered the story in early January, for instance the Guardian, and the New York Times. Teixobactin is a small peptide that acts as an inhibitor of cell wall synthesis in Gram-positive bacteria, which means it can kill pathogens like drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (often referred to as MRSA, or methicillin-resistant S. aureus).

The issue at stake here is, of course, the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria worldwide, a situation well summarized in an article at Swissinfo.ch. We have thus seen a dramatic increase in resistant strains of, for instance, S. aureus, Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Who or what is to blame? Most probably the overuse of antibiotics, not only in humans but also in animals. It is frightening to know that some pathogenic strains can survive our entire arsenal of antibiotics, while new potent drugs are extremely hard to find. Some simple solutions have helped mitigate the problem, notably more effective and systematic hand disinfection by hopital personnel, but this will not prevent all cases of infection. New antimicrobials are clearly needed, but where to find them?

Monday, January 26, 2015

The Logic of Life (La logique du vivant) opens with the following quote by the French philosopher and Enlightenment figure Denis Diderot:

"Do you see this egg? It's with it that we overturn all theological schools and all temples on Earth".

[All translations in this post are mine.]

The choice of a 18th century thinker for the epigraph prefigures a lot of this book, which was published by the late Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1970. The book—subtitled "a history of heredity"—thus proves to be of great erudition and cites the original work of, among many names, Paré, Montaigne, Paracelse, Descartes, Galilée, Harvey, Réaumur, Buffon, Redi, Leibniz, D'Holbach, La Mettrie, Lamarck, Linné, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire... and I haven't even mentioned the 20th century references yet! Excusez du peu!

This story of heredity truly is a huge endeavor, spanning about four centuries of philosophical and scientific attempts to understand what kind of stuff we're made of. Articulated in long chapters that correspond to conceptual milestones ("visible structure", "organization", "time", "gene", "molecule", and "integron"), the book follows the chronological development of our biological knowledge (which was part of "natural philosophy") with plenty of referenced sources and with a quality of writing that is hardly matched today.